02.18.10
Posted in Europe, Google, IBM, Interoperability, Law, Microsoft, Mono, Patents, Red Hat, Samba, Servers, UNIX at 6:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
THIS post will be kept as short and compressed as possible due to lack of time.
Centrify
Centrify is a company whose genesis we explained before (Microsoft). We do not trust Centrify and its new product does not excite us because it brings Microsoft patents over to UNIX and Linux instead of encouraging standards. But anyway, here is its latest press release:
The new DirectManage Deployment Manager discovers UNIX and Linux systems within the environment, determines their readiness to join Active Directory, and enables administrators to promptly deploy the Centrify Suite to the targeted systems, and join the systems to the Active Directory domain.
The problem with Active Directory is similar to the problem with Mono and Moonlight. With Samba, Microsoft is at least forced to play nice (because of the European Commission).
Google
It is no secret that Google has been somewhat of a problem when it comes to software patents (just like IBM). We have already produced a lot of evidence, including videos that show Google executives talking about the subject, but here is more new evidence for the pile:
Google Patents Country-Specific Content Blocking
theodp writes “Today Google was awarded US Patent No. 7,664,751 for its invention of Variable User Interface Based on Document Access Privileges, which the search giant explains can be used to restrict what Internet content people can see ‘based on geographical location information of the user and based on access rights possessed for the document.’ From the patent: ‘For example, readers from the United States may be given “partial” access to the document while readers in Canada may be given “full” access to the document. This may be because the content provider has been granted full rights in the document from the publisher for Canadian readers but has not been granted rights in the United States, so the content provider may choose to only enable fair use display for readers in the United States.’ Oh well, at least Google is ‘no longer willing to continue censoring [their] results on Google.cn.’”
That is a soft patent.
Red Hat
Rob Tiller, a top Red Hat lawyer who frequently speaks about the subject of software patents, has just unleashed this post titled “Calling a troll a troll” (with the picture we used a few weeks ago).
It is clear enough what message Tiller is trying to get across:
There is increasing recognition in the FOSS ecosystem that troll lawsuits are a serious problem for open source. This is an unfortunate but real indicator of the remarkable success of open source. As the profits and profiles of open source products have risen, even trolls have taken note. So much for the good news. The bad news is that trolls view open source like a Somali pirate views a container ship – that is, purely as a target. Troll lawsuits are at best a tax on collaborative innovation and at worst, for a particular target, an existential threat.
Quintura
Speaking of trolls, here is what DownloadSquad has to say about Quintura: “Quintura chooses software patent claims as revenue stream”
I’m not a fan of software patents, and I’m particularly not a fan of companies who use them as a business model. While the concept of patenting software makes sense, in practice it is a complete mess.
Patents are not products. They are only a hindrance.
ACTA
On many occasions in the past we’ve explained why ACTA makes the patent system even worse. The president of the FFII therefore tracks developments around the ACTA and some days ago he showed a European “MEP ask[ing] for ACTA docs, [should] start a motion based on Lisbon Article 218 “parliament fully informed”.” He also wrote about a “New ACTA leak, it is a memo from the European Commission to the European Parliament INTA (LIMITED!)”
The cited posts are not in English [1, 2], but they hopefully help. The FFII’s president is Belgian. Yesterday he linked to this article and wrote that the “European Parliament points to the high cost of the patent system for SMEs, and the threat of litigation of patent trolls.”
This system needs mending, but ACTA takes it in the very opposite direction. █
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02.16.10
Posted in Apple, Interoperability, Mail, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Protocol at 6:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A new story of migration to Microsoft (due to Apple’s reliance on Microsoft) offers an important lesson about the purpose of Novell’s Mono and Moonlight
AS we have shown before, Microsoft’s supine friends at Apple have helped OOXML and continues doing this. Based on the news about “Office for Mac 2011″ [1, 2], Mac OS X will accommodate more promotion of monoculture the Microsoft way. Matt Asay, for example, is a Mac user who extols the virtues of Microsoft Office and openly mocks OpenOffice.org. That’s apparently what Apple enthusiasts are for. Ironically enough, Canonical has made him a COO (a decision that we criticised in [1, 2, 3, 4]). COO rhymes with coup.
As one of our readers has said repeatedly, Microsoft inserts its APIs and non-standards into the competitors’ products and once that’s ‘injected’ they can proceed to infiltrating the server/desktop side interchangeably. As a specific example, this reader gave Office for Mac OS X (or Entourage). Based on the following new example from Internode, he was right. Internode is moving from FOSS to Microsoft Exchange and here is its explanation:
So what changed?
Snow Leopard was the key.
[...]
Apple delivered a huge corporate software upgrade in Snow Leopard, by tightly integrating Exchange client functionality into the operating system – in Apple Mail, iCal, and Contacts.
Now watch this discussion at Linux Today. “The lockin begins at internode,” says Petem. Rainer Weikusat reconstructs the arguments and starts with: “I have rarely seen such an amazing amount of BS in a single text.” Someone from Citadel writes: “Just wait until the first time Exchange blows itself up. That always happens eventually.” And one person says: “To pick this apart. All of your staff needs to have access to configure your filtering? Wow!!! Just plain WOW!!!”
“I have rarely seen such an amazing amount of BS in a single text.”
–Rainer WeikusatSo anyway, what Microsoft did here is simple. It used proprietary integration with something it controls not to facilitate interoperability but to upsell Microsoft products/stacks. It is the same with Mono and Moonlight. In more or less the same ways, Mono and Moonlight are ramps to Visual Studio, Windows, and other proprietary Microsoft products.
Why are Novell and Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza promoting these? We venture to guess that for selfish gain, some people promote this inside GNU/Linux. If their new interests are rewarded by Microsoft, then they would do anything. Stephane Rodriguez told us a couple of years ago: “So far, Microsoft has got all the marketing PR they wanted from “open-source” groups that are remarkably compatible with Microsoft minds. Again, I think those guys are just Microsoft persons who take a pride not to be on their payroll. (DeIcaza told me in the past that he’s rich). [...] DeIcaza took the role of [Microsoft's] Brian Jones, the technical person. (technical person who concentrates on never answering the good questions)…”
Here is Moonlight being used in what seems like a sort of Microsoft advert. Meanwhile we learn from a reader of ours that “Someone made Ada for .NET? (A#)”. Embrace and extend much? █
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01.20.10
Posted in Asia, Europe, Free/Libre Software, GPL, Interoperability, Microsoft, Patents, Standard at 6:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: In both Europe and in India, Microsoft is trying to exclude Free software with patent tax inside basic interoperability information
NEELIE KROES said some controversial things last week [1, 2, 3, 4]. She has been criticised recently for allowing Microsoft to embed software patents in interoperability ‘standards’ (these are not real standards), despite software patents being illegal in the EU.
Jan Wildeboer from Red Hat defends Kroes and argues that she is a better position-holder than others in the Commission. He is probably right, but it is important to remind Kroes that what she is doing is harmful to Free software sometimes. Some of the key issues she just fails to grasp as the Microsoft lobbyists fool her.
This comes after her hearing last week. If you take a closer look at what Neelie told us in that hearing, I fail to see why it is wrong. However I fully understand that some other companies and organisations are alarmed. This is what she had to say wrt Open Standards (transcribed from the hearing which is ironically only accessible with non-open Microsoft stuff):
5- Digital society depends upon open standards and interoperability. And with this in mind, public organizations should practice what they promote. If they don’t use open standards, why should citizens? I will pursue this from local authorities up to european institutions. If public data such as maps, weather information and health advise is not interoperable, how can it be exploited in new ways? And for such reasons I want to explore new ways to develop ICT standards in Europe.
So Neelie wants to explore new ways, wants to enforce the use of open standards, wants to free public data. I am not going to tell you who might have a different opinion. But I am sure, my dear Lazyweb, that you know which company I am talking about.
Over in India, a new report suggests that Microsoft is also trying to shove software patents into standards, despite the fact that software patents are illegal in India.
India’s open source software lobbyists allege that the country’s proposed draft recommendations for adopting open technology standards and software for automating different government departments and functions, favours popular software solutions from large companies such as Microsoft.
According to people familiar with the draft recommendations, a meeting of the apex body on Standards for eGovernance was held last week, and the policy is close to being approved. ET was shown a copy of the proposed recommendations by one of the persons who requested anonymity.
[...]
The most contentious point of the policy is that it includes standards which may be royalty free and non discriminatory (RAND) as compared to fair royalty free and non discriminatory (FRAND), which many experts had recommended.
“The entire standard should be royalty-free and not just the “essential” parts of it. In other words, All patent claims necessary to implement the standard should be royaltyfree. Also, royalty free on FRAND/RAND is self-contradictory. If a Standard is Royalty Free (RF) then it cannot be RAND,” says Venkatesh Hariharan, a blogger and expert on open source affairs.
Microsoft previously bullied even Indian professors [1, 2] for daring to stand up for real standards — standards that are neither software patents encumbered nor the ownership of Microsoft. █
“I have lost my sleep and peace of mind for last two months over these distasteful activities by Microsoft.”
–Professor Deepak Phatak
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01.01.10
Posted in Apple, Courtroom, FUD, GNU/Linux, IBM, Interoperability, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Samba at 7:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Centrify is strengthening Microsoft’s patent FUD against GNU/Linux; Microsoft’s patent violations and attacks on GNU/Linux explored further
When it comes to Microsoft Active Directory (AD), Microsoft is playing games with software patents. Back in September we wrote about what LikeWise was doing to Samba (not for the first time) and we are finding similarities in Centrify Corporation, whose Chief Technology Officer “was a Program Manager in Microsoft’s Windows 2000 development group, where, among other things, he drove the integration between Active Directory and the Windows 2000 enterprise print subsystem. Moore also represented Microsoft on various industry standards committees, and authored several RFCs and other industry standards.” It’s just like LikeWise and Centrify too is Bellevue-based (Microsoft’s back yard). They establish Microsoft AD as the industry ‘standard’, under the pretense of helping other platforms (same with Mono and Moonlight). One might argue that they act as a peripheral extension of the Microsoft monopoly.
“They establish Microsoft AD as the industry ’standard’, under the pretense of helping other platforms (same with Mono and Moonlight).”At the top of the page it says that “Centrify is led by a team of senior executives from industry leaders such as NetIQ, Microsoft, Computer Associates and Novell.” Well, we already know that Centrify is working with Novell's SUSE. “Our partners include Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, VMware, Apple and others,” says the corporate overview and there is clear evidence that Microsoft and Centrify are partners based on both companies’ Web sites.
Why does this matter? Well, in 2008 Centrify sort of defended rather than denounced Microsoft's patent allegations against GNU/Linux. It called it an “off-topic” post. Moreover, Centrify has just issued the following press release:
Centrify Awarded Patent in Identity Management of UNIX and Linux Systems
Centrify Corporation, the leading provider of Microsoft Active Directory-based identity and access management and auditing solutions for non-Microsoft platforms, today announced it has been awarded patent #7,591,005 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patented technology facilitates the capability for UNIX and Linux service accounts and root accounts to be authenticated within a centralized directory.
Wow. Software patents. Clients who are using GNU/Linux must be very, very impressed.
It ought to be added that Microsoft itself is violating software patents, even deliberately. CNN presents this post-mortem of the i4i case [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. In it, i4i explains how to win against Microsoft despite its abuse of the legal system (Microsoft was fined for trial misconduct in the i4i case and also abused the legal system by dodging local courts in India, then fined for it).
i4i’s tips include:
Prepare your case. When it comes to taking on a company the size and stature of Microsoft, don’t expect legal eagles to bang down your door.
Instead, Owen says, “we assembled the [patent infringement] claim, the background and the history in an extraordinarily detailed, analytical way. We prepared the case as best we could independently before meeting with leading counsel and luminaries in the industry.”
Don’t lose track of your day job. A much-ballyhooed, two-year legal battle against Microsoft can significantly distract employees and completely consume a company’s top brass.
We are still stressing rather strongly that Microsoft’s EDGI may be a violation of the law. We wrote about this a few days ago and last night we found another new post about it:
Microsoft wants to hire an anti Linux Guru
Steve Balmer, the CEO of Microsoft gets pretty scared by the success of Linux & other Open Source Software. Microsoft wants to hire a so-called “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead”, as the job description in one their recent marketing job ads shows.
Microsoft is also attacking GNU/Linux using software patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Those who do not help abolish those are unfortunately part of the problem. This includes IBM, Novell, and Apple. █
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12.22.09
Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Intellectual Monopoly, Interoperability, Microsoft, Patents, Protocol at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Europe is losing its intellectual freedom and sovereignty due to treaties for monopolies, surveillance, and artificial limits on programming
THE GREAT REPRESSION that occurs these days (partly owing to intellectual monopolies) has spurred strong — but by all means tongue-in-cheek — remarks from the FFII’s president, who says that “Swedish Patent Trolls were meeting in Stockholm, slides online, we need ACTA to send Microsoft and Linus to jail”
Their site says:
During the last couple of years intellectual property rights has grown in significance. Society has shifted. Intellectual property rights have come into focus in a way that we haven’t seen before.
That’s what they would hope, wouldn’t they? They created a meta-industry that benefits nobody except themselves. In the process, it empowers monopolies and slows down scientific progress.
The FFII has already warned about the Swedish presidency's role in legalising or at least legitimising software patents in Europe. To make matters worse, the Microsoft-EU deal on interoperability [1, 2, 3, 4] is a big disaster because it legitimises Microsoft’s software patents in Europe without any parliamentary veto power (or obedience to the constitution/s). Nellie Kroes’ agency should be brought back to the table and mend the agreement. There is great fury at the FFII at the moment and Scott Fulton admits that “Microsoft’s interoperability pledge not free enough for Free Software” when he writes:
The agreement between the European Commission and Microsoft announced last Wednesday did not mention “Free Software” by name. There is no corporation or partnership by that name, at least not officially, though up until the resolution of the dispute last week, there had been occasional hints from outgoing Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes that any agreement with Microsoft must take “free” into account, almost as though it were “Free Software, Ltd.”
It’s a very serious issue for many European developers, as Free Software had been treated as a worthy-of-all-caps entity in drafts of the European Interoperability Framework from last year. But recent discussions on revising the EIF have included suggestions from many sources, including a controversial one from the Polish government, that strike references to Free Software as a legal entity, especially as one that deserves equal protection as a limited legal body.
Thus the omission of reference to FS or FOSS from last week’s agreement drew a harsh warning from Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), one of the only entities to criticize the agreement for legal, as opposed to technical or operational, reasons.
This needs to be mended as the patent system seems to have been hijacked by a group of bureaucrats who simply do not understand technology and are therefore easy to fool. Multinational corporations lead them to recognising software patents, which are simply not legal under their sovereignty (and for good reasons!).
As TechDirt puts it in this new post about the UK, the patent system is seeking to retard science and technology with even more intellectual monopolies. Lawyers would absolutely love this.
But all such things really do is encourage more patenting, but less actual innovation. That’s because the tax rate on actual innovation — actually bringing these products to market successfully — remains significantly higher. So, if you do any research at all, you have every incentive in the world to try to just gain income from the patents directly (such as by threatening any company that actually does any innovation and demanding licensing fees) rather than doing the work of actually implementing the product yourself. After all, that’s exactly what the government is telling you to do. It’s saying that if you actually produce an innovative product, we’ll tax you at a very high rate.
As we pointed out some days ago, UK-IPO might be breaking the law and it also serves Microsoft by sneakily approving software patents. █
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12.21.09
Posted in Antitrust, Europe, GNU/Linux, IBM, Interoperability, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Servers, Windows at 5:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Expansion of some news picks from Groklaw, ranging from Neon news to the European Commission, Microsoft, Mono, and Moonlight
IBM has been charged with “anticompetitive” allegations by a company that appears not to be connected with Microsoft. Coverage about this includes:
Now, look at the company’s homepage. We have captured screenshots because the homepage will change in the future.
Let’s look more closely:
The company’s news section is narrow in terms of scope:
T3′s homepage was also all about IBM immediately after T3 had sued IBM. We captured screenshots of that too, writing about them in previous posts about T3, whose connection to Microsoft we wrote about in:
The above might become handy in the future. At Groklaw, Pamela Jones points to this article when she writes: “Well, without knowing anything about the facts of this case yet, I do recall Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith’s remark when the EU Commission announced the deal about the browser, “It is important we believe to create a level legal and regulatory playing field,” Smith said. “Everyone that has a high market share needs to respect the same set of rules. I think a number of these rules are likely to be applicable to other companies and other products.”
Groklaw’s response to the atrocious deal with the European Commission (the “interoperability” aspect of it [1, 2, 3, 4]) initially went into negative territories, after citing the ‘Microsoft press’ that says:
First, Microsoft has committed to implement a range of important industry standards in its software, including Web standards in Internet Explorer. Our agreement also recognizes that standards are often complex, and sometimes imprecise or even incomplete. To account for that, we will publicly document how we have implemented relevant standards so the information is readily available to all software developers. Our customers can reap the benefits of some of this work already in the beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, available today, which enables users to save and open documents in a variety of industry standard formats. These formats include Open XML (a standard originally sponsored by Microsoft) and the Open Document Format (a standard originally sponsored by competitors to Microsoft)….We also are posting our protocol documentation on the Internet, so any developer can access it easily without entering into a license with Microsoft.
Quoting Todd Bishop/Brad Smith from the Microsoft-funded Microsoft blog, Jones mocks the part which says: ‘“The most important question that we look at is whether a feature has APIs, or application programming interfaces, that are going to be important to the developers of Windows applications,” explained Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, in an interview with TechFlash this morning. “The browser is such a piece of software today. It has APIs that other applications call. That’s one reason we included the browser as part of Windows in the late 1990s. I think there was a recognition of the value that this creates for the industry as a whole by the courts in the United States and now the European Commission, in effect, today, because an important part of the announcement today is that Internet Explorer will remain a part of Windows, including in Europe.”‘
Jones writes: “Recognition of the value… hahahaha. Pass out laughing. But first I will point out that this seems to be an indication of what the settlement is about from Microsoft’s standpoint.”
Opera expected this to happen, but it is funny how Microsoft views its role. Last year it was Craig Mundie (Microsoft’s Chief Strategy Officer and lobbyist [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]) who said: “Google Owes Its Business To Us”
Does Microsoft really want people to believe that there would be no computers without Microsoft?
As a side note, Jones also remarked on the Moonlight news, highlighting the following important bit:
There is one catch, however.
The new patent covenant extension is only for Moonlight and does not extend to the full Mono project, which is Novell’s implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework. Novell updated Mono to version 2.6 this week. As a result, the agreement covers only the subset of Mono that comes as a part of Moonlight. “This patent covenant only applies to Moonlight and the version of Mono that ships with Moonlight,” Goldfarb said.
So the problems with Mono basically remain and Moonlight is still Novell-only software for other reasons. One piece of software that only Novell customers can use safely (that would Banshee) is latching onto Docky now.
No need for a massive evolution from the Gnome-Do Banshee control plug-in, this is a nice addition for Banshee users.
It’s a bit like Telepathy. Mono is grabbing all sort of other parts of GNOME, just like moss in a highly-fertilised garden. Novell is paying for this and Microsoft does too (it pays Novell). █
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12.20.09
Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Intellectual Monopoly, Interoperability, Microsoft, OIN, Patents at 5:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo of Wim Simons and Neelie Kroes
not from the public domain but
under the GNU Free Documentation License
(captions added separately)
Summary: Another look at a bad EU deal; software patents revisited; Microsoft’s copyright violations remembered
YESTERDAY we wrote about the European Commission failing to negotiate with Microsoft a deal that respects Free software users [1, 2]. Microsoft has been buying time and procrastinating until Neelie Kroes and others in the Commission needed to step down. Steve Ballmer's "schmoozing" trips to Neelie Kores did not help much, either.
It is rather surprising to see that even the ‘Microsoft press’ is covering some of the criticisms right now, notably by quoting critics other than itself:
Essentially, companies can sue if they think Microsoft is not following through with providing proper API documentation, according to a blog post by Groklaw, a frequent Microsoft critic and a site devoted to software legal issues. The Groklaw post noted that nothing has really changed for commercial software companies working with open source software under the GNU General Public License because Microsoft’s interoperability agreement appears to restrict commercial distribution of software without royalty agreements first being in place.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) backed that view.
“The patent commitments are clearly insufficient, because they don’t allow commercial exploitation,” said Carlo Piana, FSFE’s legal counsel, in a released statement. “This keeps out competition from Free Software, which in many areas is the biggest competitor to Microsoft’s programs.”
The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) was also skeptical.
“Whether the public undertaking will create a more level competitive playing field where open source software is not subject to Microsoft patent FUD [fear, uncertainty, doubt], as has been the case in the past, is not yet clear,” the ECIS declared in a released statement (PDF).
Keith Bergelt (OIN CEO), who last got publicly involved when Microsoft floated anti-GNU/Linux patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], has just published this outlook for Linux in a world filled with intellectual monopolies, which are Microsoft’s weapon of choice against its #1 competition.
In the coming decade, Linux and other open source implementations will continue their migration from back office transaction processing and mission critical applications to the mobile and desktop computing spaces. This will transform the nature of communications and computing devices from static and utilitarian to dynamic and intelligent. This change has already begun to show itself in the Google mobile operating system – and the proliferation of devices that have been built on it by HTC and Motorola, among others.
Leveraging open source as a key building block for rapid innovation and reducing time-to-market is an irreversible trend.
Yet, as Linux and other open source initiatives usher in a new model for invention and value creation and further reinforces Linux as a permanent condition, longer term changes in the nature of the codification and management of the intellectual capital are prefigured by a set of observable trends in 2010.
It is interesting that OIN accepts rather than battles against software patents [1, 2] (Peer to Patent causes the same problem by legitimising “good” patents). But being somewhat of an IBM front, the OIN is expected to retain such a stance.
Microsoft would love people to think that GNU/Linux disregards intellectual monopolies, but Microsoft couldn’t care about them either, especially when applied to Microsoft. The Plurk incident is a fine example of that [1, 2, 3] and Microsoft is still expected to be sued.
Owners of Taiwanese Plurk microblog site have not decided yet whether and how to respond to cases of theft of code made by the company, which was commissioned by Microsoft to build another microblog service.
While Microsoft took upon himself the full responsibility, but apparently does not want to bear the legal consequences of this incident. According to the message given out Plurk site owners are wondering what legal action in this situation should take.
So it’s OK when Microsoft snubs intellectual monopolies (it knowingly and willfully infringes patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]) but very “naughty” and “communist” if GNU/Linux is against software patents. █
“Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense.”
–Richard Stallman
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12.19.09
Posted in ECMA, Europe, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Interoperability, Law, Microsoft, Patents, SUN at 11:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won’t say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: “It’s an unsafe neighbourhood, why don’t you pay me 20 bucks and I’ll make sure you’re okay,” that’s illegal. It’s racketeering.”
–Mark Shuttleworth
Summary: The European Commission is either unwilling or unable to understand how Microsoft uses software patents against Free software, even in Europe where such patents are illegal
ACCORDING to Charlie McCreevy's (shown above) vision of Europe, one unified patent law might soon become a reality that incorporates software patents. The European Commission is being either totally bamboozled or simply lobbied to death. It’s already manned by the wrong people. André Rebentisch has this little update about McCreevy’s folly (he is no longer one among candidate Commission heads whom André is watching):
Issue 56 features the outgoing Commissioner Charlie McCreevy. McCreevy’s pet project financial market deregulation was cratered last year together with the Irish model and won’t come back in the new portfolio. He assumes an ideological mission to defend the single market for his successor:
The job of the next Commission, I believe would be to stand against those who, for a variety of political reasons, some of them may be ideological or philosophical, whatever they’d be, block the Single Market. To not allow the Single Market, the European markets to be interfered with.
Indeed, there are such forces, for instance those who prefer protection of geographical indications or the member states patent offices which obstruct the creation of a community patent for the single market.
Microsoft front group ACT is lobbying for this as it enables Microsoft to bypass the law. It is more or less the same with EIF, which we mentioned in:
- European Interoperability Framework (EIF) Corrupted by Microsoft et al, Its Lobbyists
- Orwellian EIF, Fake Open Source, and Security Implications
- No Sense of Shame Left at Microsoft
- Lobbying Leads to Protest — the FFII and the FSFE Rise in Opposition to Subverted EIF
- IBM and Open Forum Europe Address European Interoperability Framework (EIF) Fiasco
- EIF Scrutinised, ODF Evolves, and Microsoft’s OOXML “Lies” Lead to Backlash from Danish Standards Committee
- Complaints About Perverted EIF Continue to Pile Up
- More Complaints About EIFv2 Abuse and Free Software FUD from General Electric (GE)
Microsoft is meanwhile patenting everything under the sun. Yesterday in Slashdot there was another new example:
“A newly disclosed Microsoft patent application — Avatar Individualized by Physical Characteristic — takes aim at fat people, proposing to generate fat avatars in gaming environments for individuals whose health records indicate they’re overweight, limiting their game play, and even banning them. From the patent application: ‘An undesirable body weight could be reflected in an overweight or underweight appearance for the avatar. Only requisite health levels are allowed to compete in a certain competition level. A dedicated gamer could exercise for a period of time until his health indicator gadget shows a sufficiently high health/health credit in order to allow reentering the avatar environment.’ Linking one’s gaming avatar to one’s physique, explains Microsoft, will produce healthy and virtuous behaviors in individuals. Microsoft also proposes shaping gaming experiences by using ‘psychological and demographic information such as education level, geographic location, age, sex, intelligence quotient, socioeconomic class, occupation, marital/relationship status, religious belief, political affiliation, etc.’”
We have already shown that using a new deal with the EU Commission Microsoft is trying to ban commercial use of Free software. The ‘Microsoft press’ is working to distract or to hide it, but Simon Phipps, whom we mentioned in the previous post, writes the following words about the Microsoft-sponsored blogger who was speaking to Brad Smith for the Microsoft spin: “Well worth reading to understand Microsoft’s world-view. Sadly Smith wasn’t asked about the “patent promise” I mention below, but this interview helps us understand why Microsoft believed IE was important (developer APIs) and why they love “interoperability” (because it was the keyword for release from 12 years of investigation).”
“[T]he Microsoft “patent promise” is roughly useless for open source communities as it only gives protection for non-commercial uses…”
–Simon PhippsIn reference to the FSFE’s complaint, Phipps writes: “The long war is finally over, without really correcting any of the injustices but with a few small concessions from a Microsoft that wants us to think it is contrite and changed. But the FSFE is right – the Microsoft “patent promise” is roughly useless for open source communities as it only gives protection for non-commercial uses; the very essence of open source is the alignment of fragments of (usually commercial) interest by many community participants. This should be the first thing Microsoft’s new head of open source addresses on appointment, but to do it will be tough since it will take air-cover at the highest levels to address.”
It’s not about the browser ballot screen (which is no justice, either), it’s about Free software. Some reporters like Paula Rooney wrongly describe the Web browser case as though it is related to Free software, even though Opera (case originator) is proprietary. In fact, too few publications wrote about the stunt Microsoft has just pulled on the “interoperability” front. █
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